Finding Compatibles

This is the key page, describing solutions to the problems presented elsewhere.

This page is about finding compatibles, mostly about finding compatible people to work with in solving humanities problems, but also finding friends, lovers, jobs, places to live, places to work, places to get an education.

I view Finding Compatibles as the closest thing to a panacea for human problems, especially the problems of society as a whole. If you want to solve the problem of poverty in Africa, the drug problem in North America, or to reverse Global Warming, you must first bring together people who will work together effectively and without conflicts. This is far more important than anyone I know imagines.

But at the more personal level, we need ways of finding people for sexual relations, potential spouses, but almost as important, finding friends, especially one best friend of your own sex or whatever sex you are
not
attracted to sexually.

I mean more than that, much more. I mean finding jobs that are really suitable, places to live, even web pages blogs to read. Personally I need to find a friend, but that is not what matters to me the most. I want to find someone who Understands The Problem.

I have written about this and written about this and written about this, but nobody seems to understand that:

1. The best person in 1,000,000 is just barely good enough. Everyone has at least 6 independent attributes that they could evaluate on an scale from 1 to 10, or to put it another way, everyone has at least 20 independent attributes that can be binary, yes or no, true or false. To think you can satisfy those attributes from a pool of less than 1,000,000 candidates is just plain wrong. Pool size is the key.

2. Dating services do not do matching, as they claim to do, they are at best search engines. Anyone who uses search engines regularly should know that only the easiest searches produce good results right away.

3. There are so many people in this world, billions of them, that there must be good matches for everyone, but your odds of finding a good enough match any important social relationship worse than the odds of winning the lottery.

4. The core problem is mathematically or algorithmically difficult. More than just difficult, actually NP-complete. But there are genuine solutions or at least very good approximate solutions to all these problems, but they will not be found and implemented until someone takes the problems seriously.

5. You can read newsmagazines, daily newspapers, watch television, even get a college education, without any of these problems being even mentioned, let alone discussed.

6. Almost all the problems addressed in such media are deeply rooted in compatibility issues. Drugs, for example. People with truly close friends an other important relationships are much less likely to feel the need for drugs and alcohol. They are much more likely to give up substance abuse with the help of compatible other people. Some problems are obvious: divorce, domestic violence, children growing up without a true and healthy family environment. Other problems are less obvious but can clearly be dealt with in a good social environment. Parents who tell their children not to fall in with a bad crowd are right. Having the wrong friends leads to trouble, leads to crime.

7. Self-help books make things worse. They focus on better communication, which means how to improve bad social relationships. Just don't do that. Don't communicate better with the wrong people, find the right people.

8. As of this moment there is no reliable or even marginally effective way of finding the right people. But we can change that.

9. Without being about to find the right people, one lives in a poor social environment, which will be beset with problems. Recommended reading on how social problems develop in a poor social environment: What Came Before He Shot Her, by Elizabeth George.

My strongest belief is that the world will be changed by what might at first glance appear to be purely selfish activities. Many people use job-finding services like Monster.com or dating services like eHarmony.com to find a job or a special friend. I believe the key notion which could change your perspective on such services is the notion of
Pool Size
, the size of the pool of candidates. If the number of available jobs is only 10, most people using the service job-finding service will be disappointed. If the number of available men in the dating-service pool is only 10 then most women using the service will be disappointed.

Carried to its logical conclusion this leads immediately to the notion that the size of each kind of pool should be the whole world. To do this, the basic service must be free, though various public or private organisations could provide value-added services, as long as they share the basic information so that they do not in any way reduce the size of the ultimate pool of candidates, which must be global.

There are several other needs which many people neglect in their hunger for love or sex or good jobs. People need friends, especially one best friend of the sex they are not attracted to, or whom they are not interested in that way. People need someone to advise them, a mentor. Most often overlooked is the need to be a mentor to someone else. There are also needs for places to life and places to find education.

When a person is tied into humanity with all these social connections they live in what I call a good
social environment
.

I believe it is the quality of a person's social environment which ultimately affects the quality of their life. To have a truely suitable and good job is very important. To have a truely compatible spouse or love is very important. To have friends, at least one best friend, is very important. Those things alone make for a good social envionment, good enough to almost completely eliminate the need to commit crimes, abuse addictive substances, or engage in hostile behaviour.

Having a person to advise you, a truely compatible mentor is more important than you might imagine and can change your life enormously. Having a very compatible person to teach about life is important too. It makes us try to be better exemplars, to be better people so the younger person will truly respect us. Also, knowledge and wisdom will get passed down this way, helping the younger people grow into fine people.

With all these social connections, with such a good social environment for each of us, how can the world fail to be a better place?

There remains the question of possibility and the question of implementation. Is what I say possible. Yes. I can prove that. Can what I say be effectively implemented? I can tell you how it can be done and why I believe the methods I suggest will be effective. I can make a good argument for them, and have even done some preliminary work myself.

I believe that human society is reaching a critical mass, a take off point, a true watershead.

I think of this as something that can be ignited by a
tiny spark.

I desperately wish that someone else would provide that spark, so I could just take advantage of the massive positive changes which will result. But I am afraid it just might not happen soon enough for me or for anyone of us. I most especially worry about the poor, the oppressed and the criminal element amongst us, which ruin things for everyone.

I also worry about war, something that just should not happen ever, and of course I worry about environmental problems.

As I said, I think the society is at a turning point, due for a major change. I think I know what that change will be and what other changes will follow from it.

Compatability Levels:

As noted above, if the pool of candidates is only about a dozen people the chances of a good job, spouse, or intimate friend is low.

We can relate compatibility to the size of the pool. For measuring compatibily it suffices to count the zeros in the (base 10) representation of the pool size. Incompatibility can be measured the same way. For ease of understanding these are given as negative numbers.

Please see these web pages:

Social Tech
a page about Social Technology, technology for social purposes. I think I was the first person to use this phrase on the Internet, quite a long time ago.

Roughly corresponding to these web pages are the following
blogs
:

Social Technology
the main blog, hosted on this site, with posts imported from the following blogger.com blogs, which still exist and are useable.

Find Compatibles
devoted to matching people with friends, lovers, jobs, places to live and so on, but doing so in ways that will actually work, using good math, good algorithms, good analysis.

Technological Fantasies
devoted to future stuff, new ideas, things that might be invented or might happen, such as what is listed above and below.

Sex-Politics-Religion
is a blog about these important topics, which I have been told should never be mentioned in polite conversation. Alright that advice does seem a bit dated, but many people are still told not to bring up these subjects around the dinner table.

I believe I was the first person on the Internet to use the phrase Social Technology -- years before the Web existed.

Those were the good old days, when the number of people using the net exceeed the amount of content on it, so that it was easy to start a discussion about such an upopular topic. Now things are different. There are so many web pages that the chances of anyone finding this page are low, even with good search engines like Google. Oh, well.

By Social Technology I mean the technology for organizing and maintaining human society. The example I had most firmly in mind is the subject of
Find Compatibles
, what I consider to be the key page, the one with the real solution to all other problems explained.

As I explained on my early mailing lists and later webpages, I find that social technology has hardly improved at all over the years. We still use representative democracy, exactly the same as it was used in the 18th century. By contrast, horse and buggy transporation has been replaced by automobiles and airplanes, enormous changes.

In the picture below you will see some 18th century technology, such as the ox-plow in the middle of the picture. How things have changed since then in agricultural technology. But we still use chance encounters, engagements and marriages to organize our home life and the raising of children.

I claim that great advances in social technology are not only possible but inevitable. I have written three novels about this, one preposterously long, 5000 pages, another merely very very long, 1500 pages. The third is short enough at 340 pages to be published some day. Maybe. The topic is still not interesting to most people. I will excerpt small parts of these novels on the web sometime, maybe even post the raw text for the larger two.

This site includes many pages dating from 1997 to 2008 which are quite out of date. They are included here partly to show the development of these ideas and partly to cover things the newer pages do not. There will be broken links where these pages referenced external sites. I've tried to fix up or maiintain all internal links, but some will probably have been missed. One may wish to look at
an earlier version of this page
, rather longer, and at an
overview
of most parts of what can be called a bigger project.

I have used a series of e-mail address over the years, each of which eventually became out of date because of a change of Internet services or became almost useless because of spam. Eventually I stuck with a Yahoo address, but my inbox still fills up with spam and their spam filter still removes messages I wanted to see. So I have switched to a new e-mail service. Web spiders should not be able to find it, since it is hidden in a jpeg picture. I have also made it difficult to reach me. The picture is not a clickable link. To send me e-mail you must want to do so badly enough to type this address in. That is a nuisance, for which I do apologize, but I just don't want a lot of mail from people who do not care about what I have to say.